“How is he?” Pino said, trying to get his mind off getting caught and tortured.

“The Nazis let his sister see him last week,” his aunt said. “She said he’d been beaten, but never talked. He was thin and sick with some stomach thing, but she said his spirits were high, and he spoke of escaping to fight with the partisans.”

Tullio will escape and fight, Pino thought as he hurried through the streets as San Babila began to awaken. And I am a spy. So I am kind of in the resistance now, aren’t I?

Pino was at the German House near the Porta Romana by 6:25 a.m. He was directed to the motor pool, where he caught a mechanic under the hood of Leyers’s Daimler-Benz staff car.

“What are you doing there?” Pino demanded.

The mechanic, an Italian in his forties, scowled. “My work.”

“I’m General Leyers’s new driver,” Pino said, looking at the carburetor settings. Two had been moved. “Stop messing with the carburetor.”

The mechanic, taken aback, sputtered, “I did no such thing.”

“You did,” Pino said, taking a screwdriver from the mechanic’s box and making several readjustments. “There, she’ll purr like a lioness now.”

The mechanic stared at him as Pino opened the driver’s door, stepped up on the running board, climbed into the seat, and looked around. Convertible roof. Leather seats. Buckets up front, bench in the back. The G4 was easily the biggest vehicle Pino had ever tried to drive. With six wheels and a high ground clearance, it could go virtually anywhere, which was the point, Pino guessed.

Where does a Plenipotentiary General for War Production go? With this car and total authority, anywhere he wants to.

Remembering his orders, Pino looked in the glove compartment and found an address on Via Dante, easy to find. He didn’t want to aggravate his wounds, so he played with the shifter to get his hand position and grip right. Then he tested the clutch and found every gear. He used his ring finger and the thumb of his right hand to turn the key. The raw power of the engine vibrated through the steering wheel.

Pino eased out the clutch. It had a hard release. His hand slipped off the shifter. The Daimler lurched forward and stalled. He glanced at the mechanic, who gave him a sneering grin.

Ignoring him, Pino started the car again and teased the clutch out this time. He rolled through the motor-pool yard in first and then second gear. The roads at Milan’s center, laid out in horse-and-carriage times, were narrow at best. At the wheel of the Daimler, Pino felt as if he were driving a minitank down the twisting lanes.

The drivers of the two cars he encountered looked at the red Nazi general’s flags fluttering on either front fender of the Daimler and immediately backed out of the way. Pino parked the staff car on the sidewalk just beyond the address on Via Dante Leyers left for him.

Pino got looks from several pedestrians, but no one dared protest with those Nazi general’s flags flying. He took the keys, climbed out, and went into the lobby of a small apartment building. Sitting on a stool by a closed door near the staircase, an old woman, a crone with thick-lensed glasses, peered his way as if barely seeing him.

“I’m going to three-B,” Pino said.

The crone said nothing, just nodded and blinked at him through her spectacles. She was creepy, he decided as he climbed to the third floor. He checked his watch. It was exactly 6:40 a.m. when he rapped sharply on the door.

He heard footsteps. The door opened inward, and his entire life changed.

Flashing her slate-blue eyes at him and smiling, the maid said, “You are the general’s new driver?”

Pino wanted to reply, but he was so stunned that he couldn’t. His heart boomed in his chest. He tried to speak, but no sound came out. His face felt hot. He ran a finger in his collar. Finally, he just nodded.

“I hope you don’t drive like you talk,” she laughed, playing with the braid of her tawny-blond hair with one hand and gesturing him inside with the other.

Pino stepped past her, smelled her, and felt so dizzy he thought he might fall.

“I’m Dolly’s maid,” she said behind him. “You can call me—”

“Anna,” Pino said.

When he turned to look back at her, the door was closed, her smile had fallen, and she was regarding him as if he were some form of threat.

“How did you know my name?” she said. “Who are you?”

“Pino,” he stammered. “Pino Lella. My parents own a purse store in San Babila. I asked you to go the movies with me outside the bakery near La Scala last year, and you asked how old I was.”

Anna’s eyes unscrewed as if she were retrieving some vague, buried memory. Then she laughed, covered her mouth, and studied him anew. “You don’t look like that crazy boy.”

“A lot can change in fourteen months.”

“I can see that,” she said. “Is that how long it’s been?”

“A lifetime ago,” Pino said. “You Were Never Lovelier.”

Anna’s eyebrows shot up, annoyed. “Excuse me?”

“The movie,” he said. “Fred Astaire. Rita Hayworth. You stood me up.”

Her chin dropped; so did her shoulders. “I did, didn’t I?”

There was an uncomfortable moment before Pino said, “It’s a good thing you did. That theater was bombed that night. My brother and I were inside, but we both made it out.”

Anna looked up at him. “True?”

“One hundred percent.”

“What’s wrong with your hand?” she said.

He looked at his bandaged hand and said, “Just some stitches.”

An unseen woman with a thick accent called, “Anna! Anna, I need you, please!”

“Coming, Dolly,” Anna cried. She pointed to a bench in the hallway. “You can sit there until General Leyers is ready for you.”

He stood aside. The maid passed him close in the narrow hallway. It took his breath away, and he stared after her swinging hips as she disappeared deeper into the apartment. When he sat and remembered to breathe, Anna’s female-and-jasmine scent lingered in the air. He considered getting up and wandering through the apartment, just to see and smell her again. He decided he had to take the risk, and his heart began to pound wildly.

Then Pino heard approaching voices, a man and a woman talking and laughing in German. Pino sprang to attention. A woman in her early forties appeared at the other end of the short hall. She sashayed toward him wearing an ivory lace-and-satin robe and beaded gold slippers. She was leggy and pretty in a showgirl way with pendulous breasts, green eyes, and a riot of auburn hair that fell artfully about her shoulders and face. She wore makeup even at this early hour. She eyed Pino while smoking a cigarette.

“You are tall for a driver, and good-looking, too,” she said in Italian with a heavy German accent. “Too bad. Tall men are always the ones who die in war. Easy targets.”

“Guess I’ll have to keep my head down.”

“Mmmm,” she said, and took a drag. “I am Dolly, Dolly Stottlemeyer.”